


Ghostbusters

by etal



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017) RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-24
Updated: 2018-05-24
Packaged: 2019-05-13 04:31:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14742029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etal/pseuds/etal
Summary: this is tumblr fic really, or rather, written when tumblr was down."Tim doesn’t believe in ghosts, not exactly."Tim's Crema apartment is behaving oddly.





	Ghostbusters

“Hey Ferdinando?” Timmy says over lunch, a week into the shoot. “Uh, has anyone ever said anything about the apartment – my apartment?

“What sort of thing? Plumbing? Is the door locking OK?”

“Yeah, yeah sure it's all good, I mean it’s beautiful, perfect, only, did anybody ever say they’d heard, like… noises?”

“Noises? Well, it’s an old place, if it’s noisy it could be the pipes, or mice. Would you like me to get someone to come and check it over?”

“No, no, it’s fine. I’m just getting used to… it always takes me a while to settle into places.”

Anyway, he’s pretty sure he knows what it is. Tim doesn’t believe in ghosts, not exactly. But there have been these moments sometimes, in random places, when there’s been no reason why he should feel anything in particular, when he’ll suddenly be suffused with a feeling that has nothing to do with him, like he’s stepped on a landmine of sadness or fury or, very occasionally, happiness, and he has to fight his way out of it until he’s back with himself again. They said it was panic attacks but he doesn’t believe that. Pauline doesn’t recognise the feeling herself but she always says he’s sensitive to atmospheres. She remembers a time when they were little and she found Tim crying in the garden and when she asked him why, Tim said “because that boy told me a sad thing.” But when she asked which boy he meant and Tim said, “that one” and pointed to the empty swing, she grabbed him by the hand and took him inside.

At LaGuardia there’d been a room right at the end of the third floor corridor, oddly shaped and too small to be a classroom so it was used for time-outs or small group rehearsals. Tim did not like that room. He would do just about anything to avoid it and if he had to be in there he could never get anything good done. It made him simultaneously jumpy and depressed, the feeling you might get if you were onstage and someone was whispering about you in the wings or the way your stomach might drop if you saw a post about a party you weren’t invited to. One time, he was supposed to meet his scene partner to run some lines and he'd gotten a text to meet in that room so he went, reluctantly, and waited outside. After a bit, he’d heard a noise which sounded like it was coming from inside so he’d gone in to check and the door closed behind him and he couldn’t get it open again. He’d twisted the doorknob with sweaty palms and pulled and pushed and shouted until he was hoarse and then all of a sudden he heard Jordy’s voice outside and the door clicked open and Jordy was standing there talking on his phone. He’d held his finger up in a “1 second” gesture and brushed past him into the room clearly not feeling whatever it was that was making Tim sick to his stomach.

Once or twice, things have moved. Nothing huge, but in the library once he was looking for a copy of – well, Aciman’s _Call Me By Your Name_ in fact – and it wasn’t where it should have been. He spent half an hour scouring the shelves and then gave up, and was turning to go when a book came tumbling off a high shelf, hit him on the head and fell into his hands. He turned it over to look at the title: _Call Me By Your Name_.

So yeah. Whatever it is that people are talking about when they say ‘ghosts’, it knows about Timothée. And it’s here, in Crema, in his apartment.

He hadn’t noticed it at first which is a good sign he thinks, and it doesn’t feel like that … thing... in the LaGuardia room. In fact, it had only been towards the end of his quiet few weeks at the very beginning, when he was taking his piano lessons and biking about on his own that he’d felt the first nudges of it, a feeling like a breeze on the back of his hand or across his hair when he was reading. And when he first arrived the lock on the door had been a little stiff and difficult to turn but now he barely had to put the key in and the door would fly open. Then there was the basil plant: he’d forgotten to water it and it had wilted beyond saving which made him really angry with himself. They’d given him this plant as a nice Italian welcome and to make his tomato salads more interesting and he’d killed it because he was so careless and thoughtless. He said sorry to the plant and put it in the sink to deal with later. But when he got home, it was resurrected. The leaves were plump and green and tasted amazing. And another time he was eating pistachios and lazily throwing the empty shells back into the bowl so it got harder and harder to find the unopened nuts until he put his hand in the bowl and all the shells were gone and there were just five pistachios sitting there, ready to eat. Maybe he’d forgotten, and gone and emptied the bowl already. Maybe.

Then Armie arrived and everything got faster and more intense and the apartment felt like a refuge sometimes from the seriousness of it all and the demands of this amazing shoot. Everyone was so nice all the time and trying to help him but it was a big deal and fucking it up was not an option but seemed like a distinct possibility at least five times a day. And of course there was Armie, and oh god, kissing Armie and looking at Armie and Armie in his shirts and his shorts and his feet and his hair and his eyes and his laugh and what he was like when he was drunk and what he was like when he was tired and what he was like when he was leaning in to whisper in Tim’s ear and what it would be like if they… if Armie… if it wasn’t Elio, but _Tim_ who got the kisses.

After the day filming the piano sequence, there’s dinner and wine, and eventually Tim heads home to his dark apartment, half-cut and feeling a little lonely. It’s a hot night and he’s overwrought from the pressure of getting through those scenes and dealing with his body being constantly in the vicinity of Armie’s body. He’s aware of that half-in half-out of himself feeling which comes when a role he’s playing starts to edge in over his own identity and it takes him a while to fall asleep. At some point in the night he comes very nearly awake, aware somewhere far away of being cold and feeling a breeze on his naked skin, uncomfortably cool and then, somehow, in the next moment the sheet is up and over his body and he sinks back down into sleep with a vague sense that it was weird how the sheet was on him now but he hadn’t.. hadn’t….

When he wakes up there’s a glass of water and an apple on his bedside table that he definitely didn’t put out the night before.

A week later, they shoot the first kiss. Tim keeps his focus but he feels giddy and unmoored all day, like he wants to cry and giggle at once. The whole day has been close to overwhelming for them both and even after long hours all wrapped up in each other, and dinner, sitting close, they’re reluctant to say goodbye. Armie walks him back home and comes up for a drink. Tim is glad of the company. When he unlocks the door, he thinks he hears something, like a curtain being whisked aside or the swish of skirts on the floorboards. Armie doesn’t seem to notice anything so Tim doesn’t mention it.

Armie always looks particularly enormous in the small apartment, too big for the chairs, the beer bottle looking like a child’s toy swinging from his long fingers. They shoot the breeze for a while, Tim feeling the familiar Elio-longing for Armie to stay but also to go, and to love him and not love him, and, you know, fuck him forever but also just be his friend and his brother, all at once. He sighs.

“Y’Ok there bud?”

“I’m fiiine,” knowing he’s blushing as he says it, like Armie read his thoughts. “Maybe I haven’t been sleeping so well.”

“Oh, why so? When we first met you said you were sleeping like the proverbial.”

“It’s this apartment I think? I mean it’s great but there’s, like an atmosphere? Or sometimes,” he drinks, looks over his shoulder, drinks again and decides, fuck it, just say it, “There’s something here, like a presence… do I sound insane?”

“No more than usual. But really, you think you’ve got a case of the haunts? Should I be calling the priest over?”

“No,” Tim tries to make it sound convincing but his laugh is weak and he shrugs awkwardly, trying to cover it up.

“What does it do?” Armie says in this ridiculous stage whisper.

“Fuck off. Don’t laugh at me.”

“No seriously, what’s been happening?”

“Nothing really – it’s not a bad one, I mean, I can live with it?”

“Live with _what_?”

“OK, so it uh, it sorted my pistachios I think? And I’m pretty sure it leaves me apples. They turn up all the time.”

“It leaves you _apples_?”

“Yeah, and it puts a sheet on me maybe, and it sort of touches me…”

“Oh. My god. You’re being sexually harassed by a ghost-mom.”

“Armie! it’s not… I think it just likes to make contact, like brush against me, it doesn’t grab me or anything.”

Armie looks at him, and Tim fidgets under his gaze.

“I know it sounds crazy. But I’m not imagining it.”

“Never said you were. More things in heaven and earth and all that. You want me to stay over tonight?” Armie asks. “I can run home, get my toothbrush?”

More than anything, Tim wants that to happen. Armie lets him stumble through pretending he doesn’t for 30 seconds then jumps up, leans over Tim with a hand on either arm of his chair, puts his face unnecessarily close up to Tim’s and says, “Give me 7 minutes.” He snags Tim's keys and then he’s gone.

As soon as the door slams behind him, Tim feels it. He stands because that seems best, but he's not scared. There’s a chill in the air, and a weight to it somehow, as if someone was standing directly behind him, close enough to touch, close enough so that if someone _was_ there he would be able to feel their breath on the back of his neck.

“Is there… is there someone there?” he asks, softly, trying to keep his voice even. There’s a sort of soundless sigh, like the room has breathed in around him. “It’s alright if you want to be here, I don’t mind.”

He’s suddenly aware that he’s holding something. It’s a sweet, an entirely ordinary little piece of candy. He smiles.

“Hey, thanks.” He puts the sweet in his mouth, and asks, “Is there something you want?”

In stories, they always want something, revenge or to have their bones found or whatever. He stands quietly and waits to see if anything like an answer comes but he just keeps noticing the strange sensation of closeness around him, as if he’s being wound round with a weightless cloth. He feels, just very faintly, the hair at his temple move, as if a fingertip had stroked it back. Then the lightest of touches on his lips, not even a touch really, more like the little charge of electricity on your skin you get _before_ someone touches you, like it had felt in the microseconds before Armie had brought his fingers to Tim’s face in their scene that day.

He keeps very still, lets it happen. Then there’s noise on the stairs and Armie’s back.

They don’t even discuss where they'll sleep, just brush their teeth, strip to their underwear and climb into Tim’s bed, where they lie like they did in the grass, on their backs, close and companionable.

Armie peers into the darkness.

“So what, it just … hangs about in here?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t mean any harm I think, it just wants …”

“I know what it wants. Even dead people want to be near you.”

“Whaaat?”

“Maybe it just wants to bring you apples and make your bed. But I bet ya 10 bucks if I do this…”

He twists on to his side and Tim automatically turns to looks at him, sunflower to the sun.

“I’m gonna kiss you, OK?” Armie says.

Tim nods and Armie kisses him, his cheek first, then above each eyebrow, then – ridiculous - his nose and his left ear, and only after that his mouth. It’s different from the kiss for the camera. Armie is more himself, looser, still gentle but a promise underneath it of what it could feel like to be the object of the full force of Armie’s attention. Tim wants it so much and he crowds himself into Armie’s body, getting hard, not caring, wanting Armie to notice and do something about it.

“Hang on, wait…” Armie lifts his head and says quietly, “is it here?”

Tim isn’t really thinking about his ghost, he’s thinking about Armie’s warm lips, his impossible shoulders, getting all that wonderful weight over and against and in him, but then he feels the breeze again, curling around his body, a little stronger now.

“Armie…” he says. Armie looks down at him and then says out into the darkness, “you can have my hand and my mouth, just that OK, and not for long.”

“What? Armie, what the hell…” then Armie is kissing him again, stopping his mouth with a new kind of kiss: it’s neither Armie nor Oliver but someone else, someone who is using Armie’s lips to kiss Tim with a passion that Tim can’t help but open for and allow to overcome him. Armie draws back and now his hand is on Tim’s face, touching his hair and his lips with very un-Armieish reverence, like you might touch the face of an icon or a statue, something precious and usually out of reach. Another kiss is pressed to his lips and then it’s gone. There’s just Armie, looking down at him, smiling.

And because Armie’s Armie and although he’s beautiful and wonderful and Tim is going to let him do anything, anything at all that he wants, he’s also just a little bit of a dick, who has to grin, triumphant, punch the air and say, “Who you gonna call?”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm etal-later on tumblr, yes I am.


End file.
